Though the scheme of caste hierarchy had not been generally accepted by the kings and the people, the priests had irrevocably separated themselves from the bulk of the community as the Brahman caste and developed their distinctive characteristics and interests and ideals which have from those ancient days down to the present always remained antagonistic to the progress of the nation as a whole. They claimed to be a superior race of men, by their very origin entitled to demand and enforce submission from all other sections of society ; they asserted their right to the exclusive possession of all religious learning and leadership; they contended that the worldly power of the king was subject to the spiritual authority of the Brahmans, and that in vital respects such as the liability to taxes and punishment they were to be exempted from the operation of the ordinary law of the land; their religious practices and customs assumed a distinctive shape, and the sacred thread they began to wear always marked them off from the Indian peoples whom they treated with haughty contempt; they held it was below their dignity to engage in the ordinary avocations of life such as agriculture, trade, arts and crafts.
In fact, the Brahmans became a nation by themselves, interested in the religious and social domination and exploitation of the people of India. Their interest demanded, not the propagation of religion, but the keeping of it as a secret and a monopoly. The unification and education of the people became antagonistic to their policy, which demanded division into castes and submissiveness to the priestly authority, suppression of all aspirations to rise in culture and power, and encouragement of superstition for the profitable plying of priestcraft. It did not matter much to them who fought and won, and who ruled the country, whether they- were Aryan kings or Indian rulers, or foreign conquerors. They sided with the party which favored Brahman superiority and domination. Therefore, although the Maimbharata war was waged for the liberal ideals of the Bhagavad Gita as opposed to the orthodox creed of Brahmanism, and though it ended in a victory for the former, it no less effectively served to destroy the power of the Kshatriyas, the leaders of the opposition to Brahmanism.
Within a few years of the passing away of Krishna and Arjuna, the country was thrown into a state of masterless confusion which opened the way for the aggrandisement of Brahmanism. India has hardly any history for the three or four centuries of darkness which followed the great war. The happenings of the period are shrouded in oblivion, and what little light has penetrated through the gloom shows that the Brahmans were making capital of the situation and bringing the people under their domination. The Brahmans dispersed in all directions, partly because the monarchs who used to lavish rich gifts on them had passed away and partly because the weakening of the Kshatriya power had created greater opportunities throughout the country for the propagation of the Brahnianical cult of castes and sacrifices. The verbose and unwieldy Brahmans were skillfully abridged into Sutras and schools were started in various places to train priests., Many portions of the country till then o:litside the Indo-Aryan influence came under the spell of Brahmanism. The kings who had survived the disastrous conflagration of Kurukshetra were not learned or powerful enough to stern the tide, and Brahmans became the inevitable leaders and advisers of the people. The caste rules were perfected and codified, and probably received the sanction of the rulers in many places. The Sutras which form the strongest links in the chain of caste were forged in this dark age, and when the Buddha lifted the gloom we find the people stooping under the yoke of Brahman imperialism, steeped in the mire of ignorance, superstition and bloody sacrifices, their life blighted by the cruel exclusion from religion and citizenship.
The reaction did not take long to come. Like other imperialisms,. Brahman domination accomplished its task of rousing the nation from its hypnotic sleep, and the great nation-wide upheaval started by the Buddha kept the whole country in its elevating influence for over one thousand years of glorious achievement in all departments of human activity—religion, literature, sciences and arts, industries, commerce, politics I and international relations.
Sabha was the assembly of the Brahmans in which other castes had no place. . As has been abundantly demonstrated by the evidence adduced, the Sabha was the supreme governing body of the village, but the village was not of course, inhabited by the Brahmans alone but by people of other castes as weir* From the royal court down to the small village, the Bralananical power was a thing to be dreaded. It went still further and whenever they got an opportunity they began to set up Brahman kings, and we find that such rulers were placed on the throne in Kashmir, Magadha, Assam and other places.
The north-western region of India was the gateway of all invaders and here it was that the Branmans had one of their most important strongholds for many centuries, holding constant communication with foreigners such as the Greeks, the Turks, the Scythians, the Chinese and the Huns. Whenever the Brahmans wanted the help of foreigners to bring about the downfall of a king or a dynasty which they disliked, their position of vantage in north-western India afforded facilities as well as a strong temptation to invite or encourage the invasion of foreigners, and as we shall see hereafter, they freely utilized this favorable situation to enforce their supremacy in the country. These temporal advantages, in addition to the unique position they occupied as the exclusive custodian of religious lore and experts in many branches of learning,_ enabled them to control the leading strings in every sphere of life of a community, the vast majority of whom had been denied all learning and freedom for many centuries. In these and other ways the Brahman’s grip on the “destinies of the country was indeed greater than we can fancy– from this distance of time. Even the Buddha and Asoka must have been very careful not to come into open conflict with such a powerful aristocracy whose . antecedents were sufficiently frightful, as may be seen in the fate of Rama and Sita, and in the destruction of the race of Kshatriya kings, besides numerous other events.
With all the above advantages and sanctions in their hands, it was not to be expected that the Brahmans would remain quiet when their status in society was being undermined by the spread of Buddhism.. It was Buddhism which gave the nation life, and so long as that most democratic of religions continued to influence the policy of kings and regulate the beliefs of the people, there was no likelihood of the Brahmans being able to preserve their virtual dictatorship of the country. Though, outwardly for a long time there was perfect toleration and even
hearty co-operation between Buddhism and Brahmanism, the Brahman priests as a community clung to their caste exclusiveness and privileges and lost no opportunities that came in their way to overthrow the Buddhist influence. From the nature of the circumstances, they could have done hardly anything else. – The only other course open to them was to abdicate their- dictatorial and almost superhuman
position in society,-. identify their interest with -those of the nation in general and merge themselves in the brotherhood of the people of India, which the Buddha so successfully inaugurated and which his royal” disciples would have realised but for the eternal opposition of the Brahmans,—an opposition which even at- the- present day Is the rock on which all democratic movements in India are being wrecked. So much for the awful, power of the Brahmans; we shall now see how they reacted to the Buddhist revival.
Brahmans had begun to join the Order of Monks from the earliest days of the Buddha. When monasteries were built by devout people all over the country and endowed richly for the comfortable maintenance of monks, the Brahmans who had been losing their sacrificial income, joined the Order in large numbers and with their learning and influence helped to strengthen it and became its leaders. “Already, in Asoka’s time the Brahmans had probably captured the whole machinery of the Sangha as effectually as in modern times they have controlled the inner working of British departmental machinery.”*
Though they became Buddhist monks, their hereditary caste mentality did not leave them and they continued to be Brahmans as well as Sramans and often observed their caste isolation. Fahian, the Chinese traveler, mentions an instance: “In Pataliputra there once lived a wise Brahman of profound learning who did much to extend the influence of the law of the Buddha. He belonged to the Mahayana School . . . When the king went to visit him, he did not presume to sit down in his presence, and if he should from a feeling of affection grasp his Guru’s hand, the latter would immediately wash himself from head to foot.” The Brahman had developed untouchability even in those days, and though he became a Buddhist he considered the touch of the king causing pollution. The incident throws much light on the unbounded tolerance of the Buddhist order and the ingrained incapacity of the. Brahman to divest himself of the imperialistic attitude. “If in the matter of caste which was diametrically opposed to the essential spirit of the Buddha’s teachings, the Brahmans could preserve their orthodoxy, they must have encountered little difficulty in gradually introducing their priestly practices into the Sangha system, and in fact that was what actually happened. The Sang–has degenerated like the priestly class who had joined it in large
* Page 14R, E. B. Havell’s Aryan Rule in India. fi Page 1′ 7, vide E. B. Ravel.
numbers and controlled it’s working. “Buddhist monks formed a vast and unmanageable body of idle priesthood owning vast acres of land attached to each monastery and feeding on the resources of the people; and Buddhist ceremonials and forms bordered more and more on Buddha worship and idolatry.”*
Just as in the capacity of sacrificial priests the Brahmans had cultivated the worship of numerous gods and made pious gifts a necessary accompaniment of all ceremonies, So as monks they were for the introduction into the Buddhist system of a large number of Bodhisattvas, archangels. or saints, and for the encouragement of rich gifts to monks, and for the gradual growth of worship of images which provided scope for ritualism and priestcraft.. But so long as the leadership of Buddhism remained in the hands of the Indian kings of Pataliputra, Brahmans were not very successful in subverting the original principles of the order and it was only when foreigners came to India, became Buddhists and began to sway the destinies of the Sangha, that priestcraft succeeded in establishing itself as a characteristic of the Sangha system of worship.
“So long as Pataliputra retained its political supremacy the Organisation of the Sangha was strong enough to resist the heterodox Brahnianical theories. But the rise of Hellenistic influence and the transfer of Buddhist political power in the north from Pataliputra to Takshasila combined to relax the discipline of the Sangha, so that about the beginning of the Christian era, when the Tartar or Kushan dynasty had carved out a powerful kingdom in the north– western provinces of Asoka’s empire, a great schism appeared in the Buddhist Sanglia. The popular party headed apparently by Brahman members of
* Page 24, Ancient Hindu Civilisation, Vol. I, R. C. Dutt.
the Sangha detached itself from the primitive doctrine of the faith, and under the name of the Mahayana or : Great Vehicle compiled a revised version of the Dharma in which the divinity of the Buddha was accepted, as an orthodox belief, and Patanjali’s teaching of Yoga became incorporated in the Buddhist canons.”*
Before long the priest developed unedifying mystic rites known as Tantrikism which became an integral part of the Mahayana School. “Even from the seventh century itself, the development of the infatuating Tantrikism which reached. its climax in the eleventh century and which practically verged on sorcery claiming a religious bias, attracted– the notice of the Mahayana School and ere long the idolatrous cult of female energies was found grafted upon Mahayana. and the pantheistic mysticism of Yoga. . . It went even farther. A mysterious union was established between the goddess Kali and the Buddha.” Brahman Nagarjuna was one of the most famous leaders of the Mahayana philosophy and he became the Head Priest of Nalanda University, probably the highest position a monk could aspire to in those days. He was a distinguished authority on Tantrikism and from. his presidential chair in the University he advocated that Brahma, Vishnu, “Siva and Tara possessed the attributes which Brahmans had assigned to them and were worthy of worship.
The Sangha. irretrievably lost its pristine purity and ideals in the hands of the Brahmans and their foreign patrons, and the consequent schism into the Hinayana and the Mahayana paved the way for the ultimate downfall of Buddhism in India. It should not be supposed that all this happened as a result of
* Page 137-38, History of Aryan Rule in India, E. B. Havell.
{Page 167, The Glories of Magadha, J. N. Samarddar,
a deliberate plan on the part of the Brahmans to wreck Buddhism. As a learned community, the Brahmans nattirally rose to be leaders of the new religion. Because Buddhism did not actively prohibit the observance of caste from the very beginning, the caste and priestly mentality followed the Brahmans into their new sphere and there produced exactly those results which they had produced in the Vedic religion. It was the priestly class which became the Brahman caste; the distinctive profession- and unique qualification of the Brahn an. was that he was a priest by birth. In its origin, its growth and its functioning through the ages; Brahmanism has always meant first and foremost priestcraft. So when the Sangha tolerated the.”Brahman,” that is failed to convert him into a real Buddhist, it inevitably opened the door to priekstcraft and its own downfall.
But there was deliberate Brahman opposition outside the Sangha. When the whole country was baking in the sunshine of great ideals of brotherhood and a virtuous and beneficent life, when the king and, the commoner were co-operating in building up a great Indian nation, when the sacred feelings of religious devotion and patriotic benevolence roused by Buddhism, were producing glorious blossoms in the fields of science, literature, arts and architecture, when the people of India liberated from their bondage were carrying the joyful tidings of emancipation into distant lands and filling the world with the fragrance of the Buddha’s teachings, alas! in the land of that Buddha, the Brahman priests were studiously engaged in polishing the chains of imperialism and replenishing the armoury of aggression and exploitation with – Manu Sastras, Sukra Nitis, Puranas, idolatrous temples, Kali worship and other literature and institutions of wily priestcraft. The Manu Sastra gave the finishing touches to the caste
